I've been playing a game for the first time in many months! That game is Dragon Quest V. It's been enthralling, too. I'm past the prologue, on the western continent, and I just got back Saber. Mow I gotta figure out where else to go...

Shining Force 1: Decided to pick this up again, unfortunately "WHY DON'T ANY OF THESE NUMBERS MAKE ANY GODDAMN SENSE!". And people bitch about oldschool FE games giving them crap, they should go back and play SF1 again and see how nice it is to have a game where you can actually look at your numbers, compare them to the enemy, and know how likely you are to die for putting that guy there.

Funny. I played this on the Sega collection for a bit in the winter. It's hard. And your characters die. Easily.

Yeah, your characters are basically made of glass, and that's not even when the game randomly decides that it's time to get doubled. HP and MP are petty much the only numbers that don't pull fuzzy grey shit on you.

Also I'm probably going to have to restart anyways since not only did I miss a character, but I missed one of the swimsuits as well.

Zelda Oracle of Ages: Picking up where I left off in Symmetry City. Just got the Tuni Nut and the new song that lets me transport between both worlds freely.

Actually, you've only got the time travel equivalent of LttP's Magic Mirror (which only allowed you to freely return to, in this case, the present). It's another reason why I prefer Seasons over Ages where the plot item in Seasons is a little more unique compared to Ages Harp (even if the call back is nice).

Oops, yeah you're right.

Which also reminds me: it's funny how back in the day, there was absolutely no hand-holding or tutorials, but nowadays I think I'm so spoiled from tutorials that I expect the game to tell me how do to everything when first experiencing it. For instance, this new song I learned in the Zelda game, it didn't tell me you have the ability to equip the song on the ocarina/musical instrument/whatever it is. I had to find that out for myself playing around in the menu. Whereas if this occurred in FFXIII, I could expect a 5 minute tutorial on this.

Shining Force isn't that bad since as others have pointed out, there are some very basic strategies that can help you win. It's a different beast from Fire Emblem, though, at least from my experience. All that said, as someone who made every mistake possible in my first playthrough of SF, I can certainly sympathize with those who are having trouble...

Anyways, I barely made it through the Volcano looking for the Ring of Fire. Luckily, my Slime Knight survived the battle and somehow recruited a Hard-to-recruit guy who helped me get out of the dungeon with my 10,000+ gold intact. Now I gotta figure out where the ice place is, then give both rings to Clide or whatever his name is so he'll give me the Shield.

Yeah, it's a very easy game to break, and even if you weren't out to break it in half, you can still walk all over it just by keeping your main character alive and retreating to a church if you lose too many people (especially since you get a shit load of money and there really isn't anything to spend it on most of the time). Hell, even the laser eye fight isn't really all that bad if you have a beefy Knight or two to bumrush the eyes (the plains fight right after that one is probably tougher since you don't have the luxury of choke points or defensible terrain and the fight actually requires a bit of strategery in keeping more than one enemy from attacking your main character at a time; since again, everybody's made out of glass, especially if you've been getting screwed on the level ups).

That said, I do like how it took the idea of traverse-able towns in an SRPG from FE2 and ran with it as well as forming the game's chapters around the large traverse-able maps, beating FE4 to the punch by about 3 years.

Anyways, I barely made it through the Volcano looking for the Ring of Fire. Luckily, my Slime Knight survived the battle and somehow recruited a Hard-to-recruit guy who helped me get out of the dungeon with my 10,000+ gold intact. Now I gotta figure out where the ice place is, then give both rings to Clide or whatever his name is so he'll give me the Shield.

Feeling "duh" about not mixing class abilities before in Amalur. It's all benefits. Especially when you choose a destiny that gives bonuses from those combined classes. I visited a Fateweaver and reset everything. Now, I'm combining sorcery and finesse abilities, and it's fantastic. Between spells; arrows; chakrams; and faeblades, fighting is lots of fun. At character level 15 now. Mainly working on the Scholia Arcana faction quests. This game map is huge. I still have only explored maybe a bit less than 1/2 of the overall map (this includes the 2 extra DLC maps). I can safely say at this point that "Hard" difficulty definitely feels more balanced than "normal".

Anyways, I barely made it through the Volcano looking for the Ring of Fire. Luckily, my Slime Knight survived the battle and somehow recruited a Hard-to-recruit guy who helped me get out of the dungeon with my 10,000+ gold intact. Now I gotta figure out where the ice place is, then give both rings to Clide or whatever his name is so he'll give me the Shield.

So which guy did you recruit?

Oh, a flamethrower. He's been surprisingly helpful. I would've answered sooner, but I opened up my DS to see what it's called, and I ended up playing for 3 more hours. Did I mention this game was engrossing?

Anyways, I just cleared the Water dungeon and married Bianca. Now I'll be going on my honeymoon.

wrt CC, I'd /love/ to come up with some Gameshark codes to short circuit the non-boss stat gains, since they mostly just make Serge overlevelled.

See, this is the problem I'm having constructing this challenge: Serge is a complete power house character. I wish someone would mod this game and get rid of the additional stat bonuses, sans HP bonuses, to make things more interesting.

Started Ape Escape 3 the other day and finished the rest of today. Fun game to play just for kicks. Going through the post game stuff and enjoying the Mesal Gear Solid mini-game.

wrt CC, I'd /love/ to come up with some Gameshark codes to short circuit the non-boss stat gains, since they mostly just make Serge overlevelled.

See, this is the problem I'm having constructing this challenge: Serge is a complete power house character. I wish someone would mod this game and get rid of the additional stat bonuses, sans HP bonuses, to make things more interesting.

Started Ape Escape 3 the other day and finished the rest of today. Fun game to play just for kicks. Going through the post game stuff and enjoying the Mesal Gear Solid mini-game.

To be fair though, you do kinda need to have a powerhouse Serge in order to reach the developers room ending during your first NG+.

But yeah, he does suffer from the JRPG main character syndrome of being so good at everything (or at least the one thing that doesn't have a dozen or so drawbacks that make it strictly inferior to the thing the MC specializes in) that he makes the specialists look mediocre to bad by comparison.

Dark Souls  I may have been a bit unfair and hasty in passing judgment on the game. I was approaching it in a Monster Hunter mindset which obviously didn't quite work out despite both titles being so similar. Yeah, most normal enemies are easy to read and have exploitable patterns in DS but the boss fights and the overall atmosphere sure make up for it. Anor Londo was great in this regard.